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THE NEW 
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JAMES N. ROSENBERG 

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NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
1918 




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THE NEW 

MAGNA CARTA 


A FAR cry it seems from the field of Runny- 
mede in the beginning of the thirteenth cen¬ 
tury to the Metropolitan Opera House in the 
City of New York on the twenty-seventh day of 
September of this, the year nineteen hundred 
and eighteen. Yet it was at Runnymede that 
King John, driven to bay by the Barons of Eng¬ 
land, was made to grant to the freemen of Eng¬ 
land that priceless charter of liberty, Magna 
Carta, and it was at the Metropolitan Opera 
House that our President presaged a new 
Magna Carta, not alone for one people or group 
of people, but for all peoples and all nations. 

What is that new charter! Is it a poet’s 
dream of Utopia, or is it a workable plan to 
bring forth from this great and tragic war an 
adequate and noble recompense? 


3 


4 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


To these questions the Barons of England 
made answer seven hundred years ago; and it 
is to measure the President’s program in the 
light of that weightiest of historic precedents 
that these words are set down. 

We turn to a well-thumbed copy of Green’s 
“History Of The English People,” little read 
since boyhood. The picture of King John, mur¬ 
derer of his young cousin, Arthur, is once again 
recalled. 

“King John was the worst outcome of the 
Angevins. He united into one mass of wicked¬ 
ness their insolence, their selfishness, their un¬ 
controllable lust, their cruelty and tyranny, 
their cynical indifference to honor or truth. His 
punishments were refinements of cruelty,—the 
starvation of children, the crushing of old men 
under copes of lead, ’ ’ yet it will be remembered 
that “in the rapidity and breadth of his politi¬ 
cal combinations he far surpassed the states¬ 
men of his time,—that throughout his reign we 
see him quick to observe the difficulties of his 
position and inexhaustible in the resources with 
which he met them.” “Foul as hell is,” his 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


5 


contemporaries said of him, as, were they living, 
they would now say of the chief of our enemies, 
“hell is itself defiled by the fouler presence of 
King John.” 

From its beginning his reign had been marked 
by all manner of wrongs and oppressions. He 
had levied outrageous taxes upon the men of 
England; had made courts of justice a mockery; 
had practised all manner of cruelty; had starved 
to death the wife and son of William de Broose, 
the first Baron who took arms against him; had 
hanged in a row twenty-eight Welsh boys who 
were hostages for their fathers. 

But at last, after years of submission, the 
Barons’ hatred of the king overcame their in¬ 
born sense of loyalty to their lord. Led by 
Robert Fitz Walter, the Barons united against 
their sovereign. His day of reckoning came. 
Deserted by all save a handful of courtiers, he 
was forced to surrender to the Barons. 

It was near the meadow of Runnymede that 
King John of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke 
of Normandy, Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, 
met the Barons on the fifteenth of June, twelve 


6 THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 

'» 

hundred and fifteen. There, friendless and soli¬ 
tary, in the presence of a vast assemblage who 
loathed and despised him, perforce he accepted 
the terms imposed upon him, and affixed his 
royal seal to that famous parchment—Magna 
Carta. 

It was a thrilling and historic surrender to 
the rights of the common man. Holding the des¬ 
tiny of England in their hands, the Barons did 
not enter into a secret bargain for their own 
advantage. They exacted no profit for them¬ 
selves or their own class, but obtained equal jus¬ 
tice for all English freemen; and the covenants 
they wrested from an untrusted monarch they 
secured and made enduring by coercing from 
him an agreement giving them and their suc¬ 
cessors power “to distress him in all possible 
ways, ’ ’ even to the extent of making war on him, 
should he break his royal promises. 

In the three and sixty articles contained in 
Magna Carta many reforms were secured. 
Taxation without the consent of the Great Coun¬ 
cil Of The Realm was prohibited. Thus, the 
king’s pursestrings were taken from his hands 


1HE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


7 


and his power to raise armies destroyed. The 
courts, which had become mere instruments of 
the king’s will, were freed from his dominion. 
The rights of the municipalities and of the poor 
were safeguarded. Many special abuses were 
swept away. Indemnities were exacted in the 
form of compelling restitution of plunder and 
booty. Yet, bitter as was the medicine the king 
was made to swallow, in granting these and sim¬ 
ilar rights to his subjects, the chief and perma¬ 
nent fruits of Magna Carta lay in two general 
clauses, which to King John doubtless seemed 
mere vaporings and dreams, tenuous nothings, 
and yet which, to the English or American law¬ 
yer, trained in the English common law, are the 
very alphabet of his profession. 

These clauses, the thirty-ninth and the for¬ 
tieth articles, provide as follows: 

“No freeman shall be taken or impris¬ 
oned, or disseised or outlawed or destroyed, 
nor will we pas^ upon him nor send upon 
him unless by the lawful judgment of his 
peers, or the law of the land.” 

“We will sell to no man, we will not deny 
any man, either justice or right.” 


8 THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 

No words in any political document in history, 
it may fairly be said, have exerted a profounder 
influence than these two paragraphs wherein no 
material treasure but only a possession of the 
spirit was granted to Englishmen. It is these 
words that frame the principle that every man, 
be he poor or rich, mighty or humble,—whatever 
his race or creed,—shall have his day in court. 
It is but a rephrasing of that principle which is 
found in the constitution of the United States 
and of every state of the Union in the language 
that “No man shall be deprived of life, liberty 
or property without due process of law.” 

Magna Carta, then, laid and built not only the 
foundation, but the very house of liberty where¬ 
in all English-speaking people have dwelt for 
seven centuries. And if kings, plutocrats and 
industrial tyrannies have again and again laid 
siege to that dwelling-place, these principles of 
Magna Carta have, on the whole, successfully 
bulwarked the life, liberty and property of the 
individual. 

In these clauses of Magna Carta are bound up 
almost the entire development of constitutional 



THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


9 


law, both in England and the United States. 
They are no mere lawyer’s abstraction; they 
have reached into the very roots of the life of 
every man and woman who live under their pro¬ 
tection. They are a background to every politi¬ 
cal conception of men of England and of the 
United States, a conception wherein the state is 
a community of individuals, who, owing alle¬ 
giance to the state, are yet entitled, not as a mat¬ 
ter of favor, but of right, to protection from the 
state,—who are freemen, not slaves or vassals, 
and who have a right to expect that the state 
will be hound by the same laws of honor and 
obligation as those which apply to individuals. 

So deeply have these ideas permeated us that 
we can scarcely conceive that there can exist a 
state other than one where, in the words of 
Magna Carta, 4 4 We will sell to no man, we will 
not deny to any man, justice or right.” The ex¬ 
tent to which this English and American atti¬ 
tude toward the state has penetrated the very 
air we breathe is nowhere better shown than in 
our inability even to glimpse or comprehend the 
Prussian theory of statecraft, not merely acted 


10 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


on by its autocrats and soldiers, but laboriously 
developed over many years by its professors and 
philosophers. To them “the highest moral duty 
of the state,” as said by Von Treitschke, “is 
to be concerned for its power,” and from this 
concept, which is ground into the very marrow 
of German life, it follows that trickery, the 
breaking of treaties and covenants, murder, 
pillage, destruction, oppression,—are not merely 
forgivable sins, if done for the increase of the 
state’s power, but become solemn virtues. The 
case of the Prussian today is the case of King 
John in the thirteenth century. The king could 
do no wrong. That was genuinely and com¬ 
pletely King John’s belief and upon that belief 
the murder of the twenty-eight Welsh boys was, 
in his eyes, no evil act, but a wise and good deed. 
So, too, the violation of Belgium and the whole¬ 
sale murder of its people were not wrongs, ac¬ 
cording to deliberate German philosophical con¬ 
cepts, but acts of the highest virtues, performed, 
as Prussian autocracy held them to be, for the 
increase of the state’s power. 

To mention these things is only to restate once 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


11 


more what has echoed through a horror-stricken 
world for four years, yet these things require 
restatement a thousand times and a thousand 
times again so that we, who dwell where such 
concepts of the state are unthinkable, may at 
least dimly perceive the character of our enemy. 

With victory in sight, we have, then, before us 
in the Germany of today, certainly in its ruling 
classes, such a government to deal with as con¬ 
fronted the Barons when, victorious, they came 
to deal with King John. Dealing with him as 
victors, they took rights rather than territory, 
and these rights they secured—for the Barons 
had no faith in King John’s promises—by re-' 
quiring him to consent to what caused him, in 
rage, to cry, “They have given me five and 
twenty over-kings.” They compelled him to 
agree that, should he violate his grants of liberty 
or “break through any of these articles of peace 
and security,” then the five and twenty barons 
and their successors, together with the commun¬ 
ity of the whole kingdom, “shall distrain and- 
distress us in all possible ways by seizing our 
castles, lands and possessions.” 


12 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


The situation, then, as to Magna Carta, may 
be summarized into three prime essentials: 
First: For years the Barons patiently suffered 
oppression, but when once they took arms they 
made no compromise with the king; they ac¬ 
cepted nothing less than unconditional sur¬ 
render. Second: Having gained complete as¬ 
cendency over the king, the Barons chose to use 
their power, not for personal or selfish gain 
over other Englishmen, not to bargain with the 
king behind secret doors or in the whispers of 
diplomacy for greater baronies for themselves, 
but, openly and in the presence of all England, 
to secure the equal liberties of all Englishmen. 
Third: To preserve and guarantee these prec¬ 
ious liberties they constituted themselves and 
their successors a permanent League of Barons 
with power of overlordship to prevent the 
king’s trespass upon their charter. 

Let us look now to the present day. The long 
train of abuses to which we submitted from the 
time of the sinking of the Lusitania to our en¬ 
trance into the war need not be catalogued. Like 
the Barons we suffered wrongs till further sub- 


THE NEW MAGNA CAKTA 


13 


mission would have become a coward’s part. 
But from the instant we entered the war the 
President armed himself with the same resolu¬ 
tion which carried the Barons to Runnymede. 
When, in August, 1917, Pope Benedict’s pro¬ 
posals called for a statement of American policy 
toward the enemy, the President’s message to 
the people left no one in doubt that he would 
not and could not deal with “an irresponsible 
government, which, having secretly planned to 
dominate the world, proceeded to carry the plan 
out without regard either to the sacred obliga¬ 
tions of treaty or the * * * long cherished prin¬ 
ciples of international action and honor.” 

Such thoughts he restated with increasing 
emphasis until on July fourth, nineteen hundred 
and eighteen, in his address at the tomb of 
Washington he summarized his position by de¬ 
manding, as the very first prerequisite of peace, 
“the destruction of every arbitrary power any¬ 
where that can * * # disturb the peace of the 
world; or * * * at least, its reduction to virtual 
impotence. ’ ’ 

Hence the curt dismissal of Austria’s recent 


14 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


bid for bargaining behind closed doors. Like 
the Barons, the President long submitted to 
wrongs. Having taken arms, like the Barons, he 
is content with nothing less than the destruction 
of autocratic power. 

The Barons required restitution; they took 
back what the king had stolen. Here again the 
President follows their course; for in his four¬ 
teen conditions of January eighth, nineteen hun¬ 
dred and eighteen, he has demanded the evacua¬ 
tion and restoration of Belgium, the surrender 
of French territory wrested from France in 
1871, the restitution of plunder and the various 
other material settlements which are required 
by justice. 

So we are brought face to face with the great 
address of September 27th. Delivered at the 
opening of the campaign for the Fourth Liberty 
Loan and at a time when the glorious advance 
of our armies in the fields of Flanders and 
Picardy and the fury of battle burning in our 
blood turn our minds from peace to victorious 
war, this country has scarcely, it seems, taken in 
the root and branch of the words he spoke,— 


THE HEW MAGHA CARTA 


15 


words which he spoke not only to those who 
heard his voice, not only to the people in this 
country, but also to friend and foe. 

In its omissions it is as eloquent as in its con¬ 
tent. He does not pause to discuss material 
things,—boundaries, moneys, trade, indemni¬ 
ties, balance of power. Following closely upon 
the recent address of Senator Lodge on the con¬ 
ditions of peace, but touching on substantially 
none of the things with which it dealt, the Presi¬ 
dent concerns himself not with things, but with 
rights. His address begins by pointing out that 
no statesmen or assembly created the issues of 
this world conflict but that ‘ 4 they have arisen 
out of the very nature and circumstances of the 
war.” This description of the present situation 
leads us back for a moment to Magna Carta, for 
the conflict which preceded that treaty,—on a 
smaller scale, indeed, yet like the present one,— 
arose not out of the choice of the king or his 
barons, but out of circumstances themselves,— 
out of the age-long strife betwen absolutism 
and liberty. 

The President proceeds, then, to define the 


16 


THE NEW MAGNA CABTA 


issues of the war. This he does by asking five 
pregnant questions: 

“Shall the military power of any nation 
or group of nations he suffered to determine 
the fortunes of peoples over whom they 
have no right to rule except the right of 
force?” 

“Shall strong nations be free to wrong 
weak nations and make them subject to 
their purpose and interest?” 

“Shall people he ruled and dominated, 
even in their own internal affairs, by arbi¬ 
trary and irresponsible force or by their 
own will and choice ? ’ ’ 

“Shall there be a common standard of 
right and privilege for all peoples and na¬ 
tions or shall the strong do as they will 
and the weak suffer without redress?” 

“Shall the assertion of right be hap¬ 
hazard and by casual alliance or shall there 
be a common concert to oblige the observ¬ 
ance of common rights?” 

The answers to these questions are to be 
found by applying to the family of nations those 
principles which Magna Carta brought into 
being for the individual man of England. In a 
word, the President proposes that hereafter in 
international relations there shall be substituted 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


17 


for force, power, guile and secret bargain 
Magna Carta’s rule of justice. “Hereafter,” 
the President might have said, in effect para¬ 
phrasing Magna Carta, “we will sell to no 
people, we will not deny to any people either 
justice or right.” Into the Kaiser’s hands he 
thrusts the same pen which the Barons of Eng¬ 
land forced into the unwilling fingers of King 
John, and, like the Barons, he will not use vic¬ 
tory to grasp or permit selfish advantage for 
the victors but to gain equality and justice for 
all men. 

This is a matter of the weightiest import. 
With a magnanimity that characterized Lin¬ 
coln’s utterances, the President stresses his in¬ 
tent when he says, “It will be necessary that all 
who sit at the council table shall come ready and 
willing to pay the price, the only price that will 
procure it. * * * That price is impartial jus¬ 
tice, * * * no matter whose interest is crossed.” 

While the President points out that “there 
can be no peace obtained by any kind of bargain 
or compromise with the governments of the 
Central Powers,” while, in words which must 


18 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


sink like daggers into all German hearts, he de¬ 
clares that “they are without honor and do not 
intend justice; they observe no covenants, ac¬ 
cept no principle hut force and their own inter¬ 
est,” while he makes it clear that it is a pre¬ 
requisite to peace discussion that the brutal 
code of power which dominates Germany today 
must be destroyed, while his language is so clear 
that even the rulers of the Central Powers must 
begin to comprehend the meaning of his calm 
and inexorable will, he promises them that, 
though they must be made to suffer the sword of 
retributive justice until they yield unconditional 
surrender of the cruel power they have sought 
to impose upon the world, yet they shall then be 
protected by not less than the shield of justice. 

We find, then, to the entire world a plain 
avowal of the President’s intentions; an avowal 
lacking wholly in the subtleties and circumven¬ 
tions of the language of diplomacy, but spoken 
so simply, so frankly, so clearly, that even he 
who runs may read. 

What this seed will produce in the hearts of 
the common soldiers and the common people of 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


19 


Germany no one can foretell. Perhaps they 
have so long been bred to the cruel and cynical 
code of their masters that they accept it as their 
own, yet the words of the President, spoken to 
the common people of Germany, may have a pro¬ 
found effect, since the desire of justice and 
liberty is a thing deeply rooted in human 
breasts. Perhaps, judging from the course de¬ 
veloping in Austria and that already taken in 
Bulgaria, his words have already reached the 
common people of the Central Powers. 

Plainly as the President speaks to our foes, 
his words are no less full of meaning to our 
allies. 4 4 With malice toward none, with charity 
for all,” he reminds them that “the impartial 
justice meted out must involve no discrimina¬ 
tion between those to whom we wish to be just 
and those to whom we do not wish to be just. It 
must be a justice that plays no favorites.” No 
other statesman in the world has spoken with 
such candor and such daring. Nor is it an easy 
doctrine for us or our allies to accept. The God 
of the Hebrews speaks in the breasts of all of us. 
Reprisals,—“an eye for an eye; a tooth for a 


20 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


tooth/’—are almost overpowering desires to 
those who read the Bryce report of Belgian 
atrocities, whose minds dwell on Louvain, the 
Lusitania and the countless other acts of sav¬ 
agery of which our enemies are blood-guilty. 
Yet the President’s words are the counsel of 
wisdom. He hews to the line and will not let 
anger discolor judgment. It was Lincoln who 
said that “government cannot endure perma¬ 
nently half slave, half free.” The President’s 
demand of liberty for all nations is but an en¬ 
largement of that thought to meet this greater 
conflict. 

To all the peoples of all the nations, then, the 
President, in words that must have echoed 
through the world, announces that, while indem¬ 
nities, territorial and trade adjustments are 
matters which must be settled according to the 
dictates of justice, it is a greater issue than 
these things that forms the essence; that the 
issue for all men and all nations is the one solved 
for English-speaking people when Magna Carta 
granted to each individual “due process of 
law.” 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


21 


But the President does not stop here. No one 
knows better than he that to such a declaration 
of principle our enemies would give instant as¬ 
sent if these laws of future international con¬ 
duct were left to the good faith of individual 
nations. No one is better aware than he that 
while these great principles are generalities, 
glorious dreams, mere stuff for a sonnet, but not 
a program of practical statesmanship in a world 
of economic and territorial conflict, our enemies 
will yield them ready acceptance. He knows 
that none are readier with large promises and 
fair words than those who intend to adhere to 
their covenants only so long as it is their inter¬ 
est to do so. 

So he proposes, as did the Barons, a League 
of Nations, of Overlords, with power to enforce 
the charter of liberty which he proposes. For 
the Barons ’ Council Of The Realm he substi¬ 
tutes a council of the nations. 

The formation of such a league is, of course, 
no new project. It has been on the lips of men 
since the war broke out, and before. Treatises 
deal with the subject. The President has him- 


> i 

> > > 


22 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


self explicitly proposed it in earlier addresses. 
In his speech at the tomb of Washington he de¬ 
manded it as an essential of peace, but in his 
address at the Metropolitan Opera House he 
travels much further. Remarking to those 
diplomats of an earlier school who may scoff at 
his plans as those of a dreamer or a doctrinaire 
that u some details are needed to make them 
sound less like a thesis and more like a practical 
program,” calling for a justice that shall ‘ 6 play 
no favorites,” he demands that no special inter¬ 
est, “inconsistent with the common interest of 
all, ’ ’ shall be made the basis of settlement, that 
there shall be no league within league, no 
“special, selfish economic combinations,” “no 
economic boycott or exclusion except as the 
power of economic penalty by exclusion from 
the markets of the world may be vested in the 
league of nations itself as a means of discipline 
and control,” and, lastly, as the Barons spread 
the Magna Carta broadcast through England, 
so the President insists that “all international 
agreements and treaties of every kind must be 
made known in their entirety to the rest of the 
world.” 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


23 


When it comes to the time and manner of or¬ 
ganization of the league, he presents new matter 
of the highest significance. It cannot, he points 
out, be organized before the end of the war, for, 
if formed now, “it would be merely a new alli¬ 
ance confined to the nations associated against 
a common enemy. It is not likely that it could 
be formed after settlement. It is necessary to 
guarantee the peace, and the peace cannot be 
guaranteed as an after-thought. ’ ’ This he in¬ 
sists on, because “there will be parties to the 
peace whose promises have proved untrust¬ 
worthy and means must be found in connection 
with the peace settlement itself to remove that 
source of insecurity. ’ 9 For these reasons he 
points out that “the constitution of that league 
of nations and the clear definition of its objects 
must be a part, is, in a sense, the most essential 
part, of the peace settlement itself. ’ ’ 

Such, it is submitted, is a “practical pro¬ 
gram” of supreme moment. It means that 
“after the destruction of arbitrary power,” 
upon which the President insists as a prerequi¬ 
site of peace, the essentials of the peace confer- 


24 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


ence itself shall not be in terms merely of 
indemnities, territory, boundaries or other syno¬ 
nyms of power, but in those terms, both of se¬ 
curing and of guaranteeing a permanent peace 
of justice, which have made Magna Carta im¬ 
mortal. 

Such a program, hinted at first by the Presi¬ 
dent over a year ago, gradually developed in his 
successive addresses and state papers since we 
have entered the war, now fully presented, 
brings the President’s conditions of peace from 
the heaven of Utopian dreams to the earth of 
practical human affairs. It creates an interna¬ 
tional court of justice wherein the petitioners 
shall be the several nations of the world, and it 
creates an international policeman whose club 
shall beat any recalcitrant into submission. It 
substitutes for that gentlemen’s agreement, 
now called international law, which is binding 
only on those nations which have a conscience to 
bind them, a world court, controlling the nations 
of the world, and backed by such power that its 
decrees shall be enforceable, so that arbitrary 
power shall never again be given opportunity to 
wreck the world. 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


25 


If the Barons had elected to use their power 
in order to usurp prerogatives for themselves; 
had they been content with exacting booty and 
territory from the king; had they parceled out 
his dominions among themselves as feudal over- 
lords, the subsequent history of England would 
have been profoundly different. Indemnities 
the Barons did exact; the remission of tines, re¬ 
turns of kingly plunder. Such exactions the 
President, too, demands. But vital as they are 
to any plan of peace they are not of the essence. 
The imperishable contribution which the Barons 
of England made lay in a thing that was neither 
gold nor treasure, nor lands, nor castles. It lay 
in something wholly abstract,—the right of jus¬ 
tice to the individual English freeman. 

How tenuous a thing; how easy for King John 
to make such a promise,—“We will sell to no 
man, we will not deny to any man either right 
or justice.” Cynically as John disregarded all 
covenants, may we not imagine his secret 
thoughts as he granted so vague a charter to his 
subjects! Cannot we see him, in the very act 
of signing the charter, planning to wreak ven- 



26 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


gence on his subjects? Yet the Barons had 
vision greater than his. Doubtless they knew, 
for they were not dreamers, that the preserva¬ 
tion of these rights would require endless con¬ 
flict with oppression and lust of power, but it 
was with the creation of the right that they were 
concerned, and once created, it has ever since 
stood as an explicit and definite bulwark of con¬ 
stitutional liberties. In it lay the spring of ac¬ 
tion that led George Washington and his troops 
to throw off the dominion of autocracy. In it 
throb the eloquent paragraphs of our Declara¬ 
tion of Independence. 

With the background of a lifetime of intense 
study of history, the President sees Napoleon’s 
dream of power ended in exile on a solitary isle; 
Alexanders world-conquests dust and ashes; 
faded the glory that was Greece, the grandeur 
that was Rome. The imperishable things he 
sees are the tablets of Mount Sinai, the Sermon 
on the Mount,—divine charters of right and 
justice:—Magna Carta,—the great human grant 
of individual liberties. 

The mockers, the doubters, the “practical 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


27 


men,” trained in a long life of diplomatic in¬ 
trigue, will perhaps call the proposed program 
a beautiful chimera, but the servants of Mam¬ 
mon, Midas and all of their tribe, the barterers 
of influence and might, have had their day. For 
generations they have erected delicately-adjust¬ 
ed balances of power. They built their struc¬ 
tures on a scaffolding of secret treaties and of 
covert and hidden arrangements. The struc¬ 
tures they laboriously reared have proved to be 
houses of cards. The houses have tumbled, and, 
with them, the peace of the world. We turn now 
to another leader,—to one who has hitched his 
wagon to the stars. 

Such a new Magna Carta as the President 
proposes shall be granted not to individuals but 
to the peoples and nations of the entire world; 
he sees to it, however, in terms of practical and 
of the highest constructive statesmanship that 
it is to be no such covenant as that of Belgium’s 
neutrality,—no scrap of paper, but a covenant 
armored with steel and fire, backed by the guns 
of all the world. He sees that though indemni¬ 
ties and territorial adjustment are a necessary 


28 


THE NEW MAGNA CARTA 


part of peace, yet those settlements cannot grant 
freedom to oppressed peoples nor restore the 
heroic dead to their desolated hearths. It is a 
peoples ’ peace that he greatly and nobly pro¬ 
poses,—a peace which shall end discord and give 
to all peoples the blessings which Magna Carta 
has bestowed on English-speaking men and 
women. 

That Magna Carta was no dream but a “prac¬ 
tical program” seven hundred years of English 
and American liberty amply prove. President 
Wilson’s vision, then, is not merely a noble 
dream of an unearthly Paradise, but, measured 
by the weightiest and best tested of historic 
precedents, a glorious and realizable end and 
goal, which, if won, shall compensate the dead 
and the living for the anguish of this war which 
now engulfs the world. 


October 8, 1918. 




















